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B-Sides & Rarities

Product Details

The rarities box is something of a rite of passage in rock & roll. When an artist achieves a certain stature and/or longevity, a multi-disc compendium of their hard-to-find tracks inevitably rears its head. More often than not, there's an abundance of dross palatable only to the faithful. In the case of Nick Cave, however, B-SIDES & RARITIES makes a convincing three-CD case for the Australian songwriter's consistency of vision. In addition to songs that never made it onto an album, there are radical recastings of familiar tracks (a striking trio of gospel-tinged acoustic versions of TENDER PREY tunes opens the set), revelatory covers (a genre-jumping deconstruction of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song," a ragamuffin duet with Shane MacGowan on "What a Wonderful World"), and more. So rich is Cave's catalog, that this set never once looks back to his days with the Birthday Party, instead concentrating solely on the dark-but-fertile field he starting plowing in the early 1980s with his beloved Bad Seeds.

Editorial Notes

The rarities box is something of a rite of passage in rock & roll. When an artist achieves a certain stature and/or longevity, a multi-disc compendium of their hard-to-find tracks inevitably rears its head. More often than not, there's an abundance of dross palatable only to the faithful. In the case of Nick Cave, however, B-SIDES & RARITIES makes a convincing three-CD case for the Australian songwriter's consistency of vision. In addition to songs that never made it onto an album, there are radical recastings of familiar tracks (a striking trio of gospel-tinged acoustic versions of TENDER PREY tunes opens the set), revelatory covers (a genre-jumping deconstruction of Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song," a ragamuffin duet with Shane MacGowan on "What a Wonderful World"), and more. So rich is Cave's catalog, that this set never once looks back to his days with the Birthday Party, instead concentrating solely on the dark-but-fertile field he starting plowing in the early 1980s with his beloved Bad Seeds.